A big 'thank you' to you and the others working on this as it is badly needed! I've been following the progress of this work and I'm looking forward to the day when it makes it into testing. Unstable lives up to its name too often for my needs[1]. Unfortunately, my hobby project dance card is full right now or I'd probably try to pitch in.

Now a bit of cold water for real world use cases currently...

The bulk of the market is on 6700 XT and lower so ROCm is currently effectively saying 'we don't support the vast majority of our shipped cards for compute'[2] which sends a bad message to the consumer/prosumer market. Also, I do hope AMD reconsiders the requirement for PCIe 3.0 atomics support for compute as it seriously limits the utility of its cards in the consumer space.[3] It limits the compute support for most systems to a single slot (i.e. the processor direct PCIe connection) which will result in a 'no-sale' for many people.[4] I recently upgraded to a B550 system and imagine my surprise when I found out the chipset doesn't support it, but the compute drivers require it, so only one AMD card for me... this pushes me back to nVidia, or possibly Intel if they ever ship, for most of my compute needs for foreseeable future.

I don't write this to discourage you as it would be great to see AMD be successful on Linux. However, I think it's important for AMD folks to hear real world feedback on the current situation and understand you've got a long ways to go still: I'm on a full AMD system and my experience has been that it (GPU support) is far from ready for prime time so it probably won't be a full AMD system for much longer.

[1] Where key packages can disappear for months at a time and serious breakage can and does occur. I understand the need for this in unstable which is why I steer clear of it for my daily driver.

[2] Saying 'well just get a 6800 or better' isn't realistic given availability and pricing of the higher end cards to date. I had planned on getting a 6800 [XT] but was not willing to pay the markups due to scalpers/AIB markups. Even the AMD weekly drops didn't help on these cards. So I settled on a 6700 XT until prices return to a more sane level.

[3] I tried to raise this issue on the AMD forums but my message got marked as spam. <sigh>

[4] Multi-GPU setups for compute are not uncommon on consumer hardware, especially rendering and ML.

I am just one lowly engineer, but I do what I can.

The other 5000 and 6000 series cards work to varying degrees. Unfortunately, since AMD doesn't officially support them, I can't easily get hardware to test them myself.

My understanding is that the RX 6700 XT (gfx1031) mostly works, with some caveats. Gentoo did some performance tuning for the BLAS libraries with that GPU. The AMD GPU libraries aren't built for that architecture by default, but I'd be happy to help anyone compile them from source. There's an extensive open source test suite that can be used to validate GPU functionality outside of the official hardware support list.

Don't get me wrong, your efforts are definitely appreciated. It would just be nice if AMD officially put more of a priority on consumer Linux users. That's the reason I push back on the assertion that AMD Linux GPU (compute) support is there: it really isn't as what we've got are retrofitted enterprise drivers that, if you can get them to install, may or may not work for a given GPU and have some caveats if they do work. And if they don't work, well tough luck as they aren't officially supported anyways. Short of official support happening, it would be nice to see at least some skunkworks project(s) to get open source compute drivers going as the open source graphics drivers work quite well.[1]

I've gotten both the 6700 XT and 6600 to work (that's how I discovered the PCIe atomics issue: trying to run both cards at the same time with OpenCL) which is why I initially said 'can be made to work'. It took quite a bit of fiddling and I'm sure having the drivers packaged in the Debian repos will be better still as I don't know what I don't know and knowledge on the ground re: AMD compute drivers still appears a bit thin.

[1] The part of this story I find so depressing is that AMD should be eating nVidia's lunch re: Linux support. But since at a management level AMD doesn't seem to care about consumer Linux they actually manage to make nVidia's drivers look good in comparison. It would be nice if they would take a page out of Intel's playbook and give engineers like yourself their support to actually do consumer (open source) Linux support work as your day job. I can dream...

I agree with a lot of what you're saying. Thanks for the support, and for the information about compatibility. That sort of info is not always easy to discover (let alone contextualize), so I definitely appreciate the feedback.